AN elderly woman living in a nursing home has become the last native of St
Kilda left alive following the death of an 88-year-old man who was five when
the remote archipelago was evacuated.

Norman Gillies left the islands in 1930 after the 36 residents petitioned the UK government to bring them to the mainland.

Speaking in a BBC interview, he recalled the inhabitants sitting on the boat "waving to the island until it went out of sight".

However, he also regarded the decision to abandon a desperately hard way of life as a great opportunity for the younger residents.

Mr Gillies, who lived in a house called St Kilda in a village near Ipswich, died in hospital in Cambridge.

His death means that Rachel Johnson, 91, who is in a nursing home in Clydebank and was eight when residents left the island, is the last remaining St Kildan.

Mr Gillies said in the BBC interview that one of the most precious memories he had was of his mother calling out “Tormod Iain, which is Norman John in Gaelic".

He added: “And I can see her waving, with her shawl on her head, and asking me to come home for my dinner."

It was the death of his mother in a hospital in Glasgow that helped convince the residents of St Kilda to leave.

Mr Gillies said: "My mother was pregnant at the time and she also had appendicitis. They first of all had to get a message out by a trawler to say that there was somebody ill on St Kilda.

"So they got the lighthouse ship to come in to the bay, and my sad little memory is seeing my mother being rowed in the boat and her waving to me, and me waving back. That was the last time I saw my mother."

A few months later, on August 29, 1930, the residents of Hirta, the only inhabited island, boarded the Harebell, the ship sent to take them to Lochaline in Argyll, and resettlement in the Highlands.

Mr Gillies said: “I can still recall the crowds on the pier. You've never seen so many people. They were probably expecting to see some strange inhabitants arriving." His arrival on the mainland marked the first time he had seen a tree, or a motor car.

The island was evacuated following increasing contact with the outside world, and the departure from the island of many of the young men following the First World War.

The death of four men from flu, and a succession of crop failures in the 1920s, also played a part in the decision.

The islanders kept sheep and a small number of cattle, but seabirds, particularly gannets, fulmars and puffins, were a mainstay of their diet.

Mr Gillies returned to St Kilda several times and took part in a National Trust for Scotland work party in 1976, helping to renovate the stone houses in which his family and neighbours had lived.

Susan Bain, who manages St Kilda on behalf of the Trust, said: "We are obviously saddened at Norman's death but grateful that he shared his memories of St Kilda with us while he was alive, and was very enthusiastic in doing so. He loved telling people about life on the island.”

The remote archipelago, 112 miles west of the Scottish mainland and 41 miles west of Uist, is now a double Unesco World Heritage Site.

The only regular inhabitants are conservation workers and around a dozen defence workers manning a missile-tracking base.

Once described as Britain's bleakest outpost, its cliffs are home to a million seabirds, and it has become a popular destination for cruise ships, with over 5,000 visitors last year.